The harms of unattainable pedagogical exemplars on social media

Deliberate Ignorance and Myopic Intellectualist Understandings of Expertise: Are Philosophers of Education Epistemic Trespassers in Initial Teacher Education Programmes?

“…I suggest that the exaltation of TikTok and Instagram exemplars-based on highly curated and idealised professional personas who carry out their practice in heavily prerehearsed and unrealistic scenarios, which are heavily edited and in no way representative of real-world experience-comes at the cost of pre-service and early career teachers engaging with relatable and attainable exemplars, who make mistakes and are not immediately sure how to diagnose what has gone wrong (see Kotsonis and Dunne 2023). What is more, those practitioners who seek to imitate or emulate the supposed achievements of unattainable and unrelatable pedagogical exemplars also risk adversely affecting their well-being, because their efforts, no matter how hard they try, are likely to fall short of the curated and idealised practices that are to be found on social media platforms.…”

Disney characters as moral role models: a discourse analysis of Coco and Encanto

“…The focus should not be on imitating the models but on using them as a medium for selfdiscovery because "there is a significant difference between becoming like the exemplar and becoming what the exemplar exemplifies" (Vos, 2018: p. 22). A method of doing this is using relatable and attainable models as discussed earlier, but also understanding the exemplar's imperfections to reduce their superiority so they are not perceived as perfect individuals placed on a pedestal (Croce and Silvia Vaccarezza, 2017;Osman, 2019;Croce, 2020;Kotsonis and Dunne, 2023). This can lead to the emotion adoration (Schindler, 2014) or hero-worship (Kristjánsson, 2017), which involves learners mindlessly obsessing over the role model and possibly emulating their flaws.…”